Love sony kit

Stick to FAT for now

It's got no problems with SDHC cards and I'm betting that if these new devices support older SDHC then they'll support FAT on SDXC as well.

But yes, I too join the calls for another file system. A free one with no royalty agreements, then we can all get along. Doesn't have to be extX or anything else currently linux-associated, just available for all.

Otherwise MS are once again inserting themselves into the user's life, right in between their digital camera and whatever computer-like device they want to be able to use to read it. I don't want that, thanks all the same.

No musical exemption for arses?

Says it all really

"a backlash against perceived heavy-handedness could lead to members of the public becoming more aware of their rights, less co-operative, and ultimately far more difficult to police."

People becoming familiar with their rights is the last thing the filth want, because it might mean they have to abide by the rules and stop acting like violent oppressors given half a chance. See the recent London economic protests and their "kettling" tactic for further evidence of the us vs. them attitude in much of the UK police force.

@Louis - Re: Intel is delusional

I'm sorry, but did you just spout that old fallacy that software engineers can't do parallel programming?

Multi-threaded processes in the server space have been around for over a decade. Multi-process architectures for several decades.

We can do parallel. If *you* can't then that's *your* problem and *you* need to up your game or move out of the software business. The fact that desktop apps and games don't fully take advantage of multiple cores is neither here nor there, the industry has been designing and building industrial/military grade software for multi core machines for long enough.

By the way, I thoroughly disagree with that blog you reference too. The guy has clearly never heard of a thread pool and taking him as any sort of authority is ill advised.

Why does twitter renegotiate?

I really thought that re-negotiation was a rare phenomenon, and that this attack was hard to pull off without some way to force a renegotiation to occur, or a site that specifically uses it for either client certificate authentication (unusual) or multiple different crypto levels for different parts of a site (totally unnecessary).

Didn't think the N270/280 could do 64 bit?

@Simon Rowsby

I agree - there are a lot of people that seem to think that SSL (actually TLS now) is a magic bullet to this.

It isn't, not without some major re-architecting of P2P infrastructure. There exists the possibility of creating a system in which you talk directly only to people you know and bounce or hop through them to people they know and so on. This can be achieved by certificate signing amongst friends, and there is a need for a user-friendly way of doing this. It would also slow things down considerably but eventually be mitigated by increasing speeds.

In this way you could still exchange data with total strangers (what's good about P2P) but with every link along the way being trusted, and nobody knowing the source or destination of any data, nor anyone outside the circle knowing the content. And unlike freenet you could make sure you only participate in transfers of things you don't have an ethical objection to.

I had this idea all by myself, but as with all of these things I was lazy, the time for the idea was clearly just right and other people also thought of it and wrote it - check out "OneSwarm".

Not that I necessarily advocate piracy, but I sure as hull advocate keeping your activities secret from the government.

@Ian

Filesharers are the big one. Part of the problem is that when much more traffic becomes encrypted, it's much more difficult to tell what's what.

At the moment you can probably filter on criteria such as port number and destination, then quickly discount most online finance and shopping. If all the major P2P goes encrypted and starts using tricks like random ports, protocol disguises, adaptive data rates, temporary keys, multiple hops, webs of trust etc etc (all starting to show up in cutting edge applications) then it becomes very, very difficult to sort out what might be more serious, in the eyes of the spooks.

Personally I don't think it's a bad thing, that their lives are made more difficult. I do worry about our key disclosure laws because I'm pretty tech and crypto literate, but I'd have a hard time (by protocol design) giving them the keys to my encrypted comms, because they're gone now.

2% say yes... that's familiar

Is that not the same proportion that attend church regularly? Seems this poll could be indicative after all.

I've seen a lot of their "Does God Exist? Yes, No, Maybe" posters about the place, most have them in London seem to have been vandalised to have the "NO" box ticked as well. Personally I hope that the UK is transforming itself into a largely post-religious society, all that organised religion seems to stand for these days is prejudice and anti-rationality.

Believe if you like, but I reserve the right to think you're delusional.

Wait, what?

"Making an indecent image of a child is a strict liability offence under the Protection of Children Act"

Got it, naked children are indecent, regardless of circumstances, security concerns, whatever. All children should be sewn into their clothes at birth and only let out when they reach 18, for their own protection and to protect adults everywhere from being corrupted and turning into raging paedos.

Hell, better make that 30.

This is what you get when terrorist hysteria and child "protection" hysteria mix. Can we just have everyone involved on both sides put down for their own good?

Tired old crap

This colour-coded jewellery for sexual favours thing is nonsense. It comes up about once every two years when some newspaper has nothing better to say.

They've been touting this nonsense on and off about these plastic arm-bands for almost a decade now. Before that it was "friendship bracelets" which I'm sure anyone of my generation (born late 70s) will remember the girls making from bits of coloured string and giving out.

There was never anything to it then (more's the pity IMHO...) and there's nothing to it now. The fact that an MP has fallen for it speaks volumes.

Seriously, I know people who've had to do all sorts of weird things like setup XP virtual machines to run older printers because Vista refuses to use them and the manufacturers haven't made updated drivers.

Games eh?

PAF Damn weel ought to be free

We pay for it, to deny us access to it due to profit/copyright concerns is just nonsense.

Royal mail need to stop living in the 1950s, we're in an information age and they're quickly becoming an irrelevance. Providing public services like a free and open PAF and their other address-related data would be a good way to justify the susbidies we give them.

Miss Moderatrix...

I wouldn't say that female-only carriages were sexist. I would say the fact they are needed is sad, and that their existence can only further spur the attitude that male is a potential groper.

It's just a shame there's no easy way to identify and remove the perverts, because otherwise I would have said that being all crushed up on a train was a great way to break the ice and meet people in an otherwise cold and impersonal metroplex.

Challenging environment my arse

As the UK's only big store PC and parts retailer it amazes me that they can continue being bad enough to make a loss in an environment with basically zero competition.

They're overpriced, their stock is usually last year's tech, the prices for small bits and pieces, especially memory cards, are extortionate. Their audience must basically be people who are in a hurry (the only time you'll find me there) and those who are too old to trust the internet.

@Reality Dysfunction

It's amazing the amount of rubbish they cram on there isn't it?

I bought a vaio a little while ago because they're slim, light and powerful. Took bleeding ages to clean up the windows install. They even had the cheek to put locked versions of a few movies on there that could be unlocked with money. That was 4GB of disk I reclaimed quick-sharp.

Now my baby runs linux and all is well with the world...

Good to see someone taking an alternate browser seriously, though I have no doubt that this will be something to do with sharing ad revenue.

They had me until windows

Nokia have always been good at interface and device design. I'm not sure why they'd put out a generic windows netbook at this point. They're following quite a way behind the other players when they usually lead.

@Mycho

I thought the 9 months was from the date of the ruling - so pretty soon.

I'd be very surprised to hear if anything much comes out of the changes in the law though. The civil service, police and politicians seem to be dead set on keeping as much information on all of us as they can get their greasy paws on.

Looks a bit like the "crunchpad" project

@Fraser

"Either you agree or not? You can't disagree with something and wholehartedly support it unless you've perfexted doublethink. I personally don't think that making "fair use" copies of your own physical media onto other formats for personal use is a problem, it should be explicity legal. I don't believe that I should make this happen by putting copies of all of my music and videos onto the internet for all and sundry to take whenever they want."

And how are you going to make those personal copies? All the tools are illegal. I can't even use media I buy in all the machines I own because of stupid restrictions on region coding and other crappy DRM.

That's why I support it. At the moment there is no protection of fair use and the bias is too far to one side, the social contract that makes up copyright is being utterly abused by one side - so fuck 'em, total disobedience on the other is what they'll get in response. When the contract is rebalanced then perhaps we can all start cooperating and acting lawfully again.

As for the rest of your last post, it's not worth bothering with. You just childishly reduce different crimes to the same thing again, despite knowing that one is depriving someone else of property and the other is an act of copying, and then repeat you naive assertion that the UK populace give a crap about holding existing political parties to their manifesto promises.

@Fraser again

There's more to the debate than file sharing. There are vast numbers of people who are upset at the growing corporatisation and anti-privacy politics that are going on in the western world.

The pirate party represent a different view point that none of the mainstream do.

I don't agree with unbridled copying of other folks work, but I will support it wholeheartedly until DRM and region coding go away, copyright terms are reduced significantly and anti-technology laws like the DMCA and EUCD are repealed.

The pirate party represent the will of a certain section of the people here, saying it's just a bunch of crooks is stupid.

Also, your attitude on copyright and stealing is dumb. If I steal a car, you don't have it any more. That doesn't make unauthorised copying right or better but it's not the same. Why do we need to reduce everything to the point of the ridiculous? Are we children that can't cope with more than one type of crime? Murder is just like stealing too, stealing someone's life. Parking without a ticket - stealing a space! It's all theft, whatever you want to call it, so it's all the same in my eyes!

Nonsense.

As for your assertion that the other parties have manifestos so they can held to account - how wonderfully naive you are. I'd love to live in your world.

Well, let's get rid of half of them anyway. Why the hell the Tory party is involved in "Community Relations", "Culture", "Media and Sport", "Family" and various other of those sections is a mystery to me.

Less government is good government.

And to all the moaners - I don't give a stuff about your music or software, I'm not copying it or buying it, but I think my generation cares about the surveillance society, the handing of rights and laws to the corporate masters of IP and the suppression of technology (legitimate or otherwise) to support business interests.

@jsp

""If someone ever releases a PC running Linux that Joe Average can use to surf the web..."

But that's never going to happen is it."

If you can't pick up a netbook running linux and get from powered-off to web-browser inside a minute you need to back away from the keyboard right now and NEVER darken the doors of a tech site like this again, that is an absolutely stunning level of incompetence!

@Anonymous Coward

"OK, now deploy it to all 60/600/6000 machines you have running Linux. Some of which are running mission critical applications. Don't forget, it needs a recompile of a kernel and a reboot to fix"

Actually, some work is being done at the moment (not sure if it made the mainstream) to remove the need to reboot when swapping out the kernel. Not sure why you mention recompiling, because nobody in their right mind does that now, not in a mission critical situation. You use the one supplied by your distro.

And if they're mission critical, you have them firewalled and you don't allow just anyone local access anyway, right?

Privilege escalations are nothing new and are present in many OS's. This will be fixed and forgotten like many others.

@AC - Re: Repositories, drivers etc

Drivers tend to be built into the kernel and just work or are not present. Installing drivers is not really done in the linux world, outside of some specialist things, like nVidia cards. Which is exactly the same on windows, gamers and other 3d geeks constantly downloading and reinstalling nVidia stuff to make sure they're getting that extra 0.5 fps...

You say you want to be able to "just download stuff from the net and run an installer".

You can.

IF the software maker supplies the software as an rpm or deb file. No problem. That said, I have never needed to go outside the repositories on debian, it has soemthing like 25,000 pieces of software that can do pretty much anything you ever thought of.

I know, coming from the windows world you feel the need to search the web, download something untrusted with a trojan in it and let it loose on your machine, this is a habit to get out of with linux.

Humbug.

Should I mention DVDDecrypter?

I mean, I know it's illegal and stopped both development and official distribution some time ago, but it doesn't take much to find it. Then your fair use is protected. And then there's AnyDVD which is a commercial product that can remove protections and make copies of pretty much anything up and including BluRay.

Unlike RealDVD, which I understand just changed encryption schemes and locked the copy to your PC.

Why all the (random) hatred?

Seriously, if you like windows or OS X then good for you, use it.

Those of us that like an open OS with many more capabilities than either, but with a learning curve and some work needed, will continue to exercise and expand our grey matter. During that process we'll get a great OS and much deeper insight into the workings of everything, becoming more knowledgeable and employable whilst we're at it.

If Photoshop is the only reason you use a computer, buy one that runs photoshop well. Frankly I doubt that 10% of the people that whine about Adobe products not being available on Windows have actually paid for a license for it anyway, if they even have a legitimate windows license.

@The Dorset Rambler

It started as a hobby OS, but some companies now sell support services, others sell consultancy and customisation services, still others sell hardware with Linux as operating system. It benefits them to contribute patches and functionality.

The reason a lot of people like it is because price/performance wise it is the best value UNIX(like) system out there, and the most widely supported in terms of hardware and software options. It's also closer, in terms of user experience and coding environment, to the other Sys V derivatives (AIX, Solaris, HP-UX) than the BSDs.

Who buys windows?

Windows comws with new PCs, if MS is having trouble selling its OS then it's because the PC market has slowed down markedly in the last couple of years. Last year's machine is no longer useless. That machine from 5 years ago can still browse the web and do the documents fine.

What a load of old tosh

So because they think they cam along before podcasting was on the scene that they deserve a patent on the frigging obvious?

When the term "podcasting" was first mooted I hated it. There was nothing new there then. WOW, someone made downloadable sound files, and someone else made a piece of software to grab a notification off a website and check for new stuff. Podcasting was then added as a pretentious term over the top to cover the two activities.

Nobody deserves a patent for that. Hell, if they did invent it they deserve a good punch to the gut.